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Friday, 13 June 2008

“It is not good for man to be alone. Hitherto all things [in Genesis] that have been named, were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named not good.” —John Milton, Tetrachordon (1645).

“Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it, whether we’re married or unmarried, optimists or pessimists, heterosexual or homosexual. Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share…. It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.” —Rowan Williams, A Ray of Darkness (1994), pp. 121-26.

Surely Dylan's line from Joanna 'we sit here stranded 'though we're all doing our best to deny it' is Williams point put more succinctly. Hart's contention in his little essay Christ and nothing probably is the best explanation of why.